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Published June 04, 2025

One of the things I wanted to add to this site was some links on the bottom of blog and TIL posts that would go to the previous and next posts. I thought that this should be pretty easy but it turns out it's not quite as easy as I thought it would be. I ended up writing a plugin to do the work but for some reason it didn't want to run. Long story short I figured out that certain plugin hooks weren't actually being called so I put up a PR to fix that. This is probably like my 10th PR in the project and, after it was merged, I was granted merge rights in the project. I guess that makes me a maintainer for the project now.

That little bit about me becoming a maintainer for render-engine isn't the reason I'm writing the post. This is actually a post about the plugin. I wasn't sure if this should be a *me* thing or a *we* thing. Part of the philosophy of the project is that it should be "batteries not included", meaning it should be the basic functionality to get the site working and other things should either be in users' own site code or through plugins. This is definitely a 🔋. Not something to include. But it could have value for other people. So my next project is going to be taking the plugin I wrote in my own codebase and turn it into a plugin that anyone can use.

Writing the actual code for the plugin is easy. It's done. Taking that code and converting it from something small that runs in my site (or will once we release the fix I made) to something that people can install with pip or uv is not. This is completely uncharted waters for me. I have written a lot of code. I have written code that gets turned into something that goes into a package index (either PyPI or a corporate mirror.) I have never touched any of the packaging and distribution stuff. And there's a lot of stuff there that I'm going to need to learn to get it right.

So I sent up a smoke signal on Mastodon and got some helpful answers. I think this response from Tekktrik sums up the size and scope of this nicely. This is a not small task. (In the post that Tekktrik is responding to David says, "I think I just described 5 different blog posts and a talk idea.") And these are folks who do it all the time.

I expect in the coming days you'll probably see a number of TIL posts on the topic of Python packaging and builds and pushing things up to PyPI. I willingly accept this task because I know other people can find value in this plugin and because I think it's time I start to get to know this side of the ecosystem as well. I also think that I'm going to figure out how I can convert the code I wrote to add the "Most Recent" posts to the homepage into a plugin so that other people can use that too. And I was also thinking about taking the word search generator I wrote for the PSF booth and putting it up as well. And I was also thinking about... I can probably go on for a while about things I've done that maybe other people would find use for. We'll see what else I decide to throw out into the world.